BJJ Grrl

I took Monday night off from class to hang out with one of my best friends. She only gets Monday nights off. I’m trying to be less insane about missing a single class, and spending time with my best friends is definitely a good reason to miss a class.

And, surprisingly, I got up the next morning, went to work, and went to class. Life continues. The world didn’t end.

I’m a nutcase…

BJJ, gi class

Tim gave me hard time about missing a class, as if I’d missed a whole week. It’s nice to be missed.

Note to self: Wait until class is about to start to put on gi top. I got there ~45 minutes early and got dressed, so I was toasty by the time the warmup started.

After the warmup, we rolled twice. I had one of the newer judo guys and then Nick. He makes me laugh when I roll with him. Then we drilled a gi choke from mount: go for the cross-choke (?); when they defend, switch to S-guard, feed the lapel on top around and under to your bottom hand, weave your top hand around their top arm and to the exposed side of their neck, then pull down on the lapel while sliding down with the top hand. Then drilled, if that one doesn’t work for some reason, switching to the armbar. I worked with Nick, and he also showed me how to grab the arm and their pants/belt so they can’t spin out.

In one of the pairs, one of the guys was having trouble getting the choke to work. He had his partner in the right position and was doing what seemed to be right, but his partner kept saying it wasn’t working. Tim was walking around, so the guy on top, still holding the choke, turns to look up at Tim and ask questions. Except, when he turned, he actually sunk the choke really tight. His partner started tapping, but he didn’t notice. Tim finally looked down and saw the guy tapping; he pulled them apart quick.

We worked the drills up until 8, when I had to leave for TKD. They were starting to roll as I left.

Read Renzo’s Mastering Jujitsu over the weekend. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I do want to read it again. And again, and again. It’s more about breaking the game down — and includes thoughts on the “free movement” (which will be useful for my kickboxing) and “clinch” phases of a fight — and less about specific techniques, though some of those are included. (And Matt and Paul are two of the photo models, so that was fun. I get to point and say, “I met them!” and feel like a big doof.)

I also really, really liked all the points made about where traditional martial art schools fail, especially with “deadly techniques” that are never trained live. A lot of those points, I’m happy to say, we address in some way at TKD; for example, all our sparring is full contact (though contact level starts light with gold belts and increases as you move toward black; point there is these are potentially dangerous techniques, so the control of contact level is for your partner’s safety. We’ve had gold belts break each others’ arms with round kicks in sparring because the other guy tried to block incorrectly. Doh.).

There’s another MA club on campus that refuses to spar with us because their techniques are “teh deadly”, but they never practice those on each other, either, obviously. And there is a style of TKD that does “no contact” sparring only; we’ve had 3rd and 4th degree black belts turn and walk out of the club as soon as they saw that we do full contact sparring. Oi! They both say that when adrenaline kicks in in a real fight that their technique will work, but they really don’t know that, do they? We know ours works under a controlled “real” fight such as tournaments.

(In case you hadn’t guessed, the book made me think a lot, and that’s a good thing.)

Felt as if the full title of the book should have been “Mastering Jujitsu for MMA” because it talked at length about how everything fit in with MMA competitions (and self-defense: there was also lots of references to “in a real fight” throughout). But still, lots of take home points for BJJ: taking the opponent out of where he’s strong and position, position, position are the two I can remember right now. (Really, though, the whole book is quotable.) That and all the references to how BJJ is designed to let a smaller person can defeat a larger; I knew that, but I need repetition. So I should be the deadliest person on my team because I’m the smallest, right?